


A Million Shadows [9/10]

by balthesar



Series: A Million Shadows [9]
Category: Torchwood
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-09-02
Updated: 2011-09-02
Packaged: 2017-10-23 09:07:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,918
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/248615
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/balthesar/pseuds/balthesar
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>'I'm sick to death of hearing all about the bloody epidemic. Black fucking Death my arse,' Owen declared vehemently. 'They're just asleep.'</p><p>'Comatose,' Ianto corrected him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Million Shadows [9/10]

"... epidemic has spread to epic proportions. Fully one-half of Wales and southern England has been affected in some way and the 'sleeping sickness' is starting to spread into Scotland. Air travel is currently restricted and the French government has closed the Chunnel..."

Ianto clicked to the next channel on the small black and white television. It perched atop a stack of phone books just inside the door of the closet-sized back office at Historic Cardiff Walking Tours.

"... Medical authorities are still at a loss as to how to cope with the mysterious illness. They're calling it the 'worst outbreak to hit Britain since the Black Death...'"

Click.

"... no cure in sight; at this point, attempting to treat the symptoms is the best solution..."

Click.

"... Even the royal family has been hit hard: Prince William reportedly has overslept after complaining of a sore throat..."

"Turn that bollocks off," Owen growled, the bell on the front door jangling as it slammed shut behind him.

Ianto raised his eyebrows and muted the set. "Good morning."

Owen clutched a travel mug of white coffee which clearly hadn't begun to take effect -- a frown was firmly etched across his forehead. "I'm sick to death of hearing all about the bloody epidemic. Black fucking Death _my arse_ ," he declared vehemently and gulped his coffee. "They're just _asleep_."

"Comatose," Ianto corrected him.

Owen shot him an irritated look as he walked around the counter.

"So what are we going to do about it?" Ianto asked, turning in his chair to face him.

" _'We'?_ I don't know anything about 'we'," Owen replied, steadily working his way towards surly. " _I'm_ going to work on bloody well fixing it and _you_ \-- you'll probably just make another bloody pot of coffee and take out the rubbish." He savagely punched the button to open the hidden door to the Hub and stalked into the hallway without another look back.

"Christ. Am I the only doctor left in this fucking country?" Owen groused aloud as his voice retreated.

***

"Jack, can we talk?" Gwen asked, poking her head into Jack's glass-fronted office. He sat behind the desk doing paperwork, signing off on requisitions forms and expense accounts streaked with red and blue from the 3-D glasses hanging from his lamp.

He glanced up with a playful smirk. "We are right now."

Gwen stepped inside then, closing the door carefully behind her. "I mean seriously." She sat opposite Jack, leaning forward, only half on the seat. "This might not be the best time, but... I just can't stop thinking about it."

"What's up?" He wore an expression of professional concern.

She paused to collect her thoughts for a moment. "You knew Mary."

Jack's expression morphed into something more personal and more guarded. "Yeah."

"Was she an alien?" Gwen asked, surprised by the easy answer she'd received.

He looked mildly amused. "No."

Gwen frowned a little, starting on another tack. "But the pendant--"

Jack shook his head. "There's a lot of junk out there and no reason why the aliens should have it all."

She felt a little bolder. He wasn't being entirely clear, but here she was, asking him the questions everyone on the team had on their mind, and was actually getting some answers. "She's clearly not from around here. Were you in the military together?"

Jack sat back, crossing his arms. "No." He reminded Gwen of an exotic fern she'd seen once; if you brushed your finger down the frond, it would instantly curl up protectively.

"She had a wrist computer like yours," she observed pointedly. "Jack, how the hell do you know Mary?" Gwen assumed there was a lot he hadn't told her -- hadn't told any of the team -- but now there was a vast and obvious gulf between what they knew about Jack and the truth.

Jack sighed. Privately, he debated how much to tell her. Of course he could trust her, but how much was she going to keep to herself as a personal revelation and how much was she going to publicly announce in hope of winning the office pool or something? How much might seep out of the Hub and into the world beyond? He leaned forward on the blotter. "We worked together."

Gwen frowned with frustration. "When? Where?"

He shrugged. "Everywhere."

"That is _not_ an answer."

Jack pinned her with his gaze. "It's all you're getting. Look, Gwen... there's a lot about me that isn't safe to know. Like the details of my work with Mary. If it got out--" He sighed and shook his head again. "They're a lot bigger than us, it wouldn't take anything for them to come here and wipe us out. They've already done too much--" Jack was growing a little agitated, beginning to churn under the tough exterior.

Impulsively, Gwen reached over and squeezed his hand. "What happened?"

"They--" Jack frowned, concentrating on the grain of the desktop wood by their linked hands. "They stole two years of my life. I don't remember anything from then. It's just blank."

Gwen's jaw hung open. " _What?_ Two years?" She barely refrained from asking 'If you don't remember it, how do you know how much you lost?' in deference to Jack's emotional state.

"Yeah." His tone was measured, precise, guarded.

"Oh, Jack," she breathed.

They sat in silence for several moments before Jack seemed to snap out of it, his brooding mood pushed away a little. "Anything else?" he asked with a faint smile.

"No," Gwen replied quickly. She was sitting at her desk minutes later before she realized she'd forgotten to ask a dozen other questions on her mind: what Mary was using the pendant for, and who was after Jack and why, and where Jack was from, and why Mary had recognized Ianto. Damn it.

***

"What's all this?" Jack asked, as he followed Gwen into the boardroom. Toshiko was already sitting at the wide table, looking expectant and bored; Ianto hovered in the corner, his navy suit rendering him unobtrusive. Owen stood at the head of the table, brandishing a marker. He had found a small whiteboard in some dark corner of storage and had it propped up on a three-legged stand.

"He watched 'House', obviously," Toshiko observed dryly.

"Note to the peanut gallery: not interested in an editorial," replied Owen with a pointed jab of the marker in her direction. Jack looked more amused than the others as he and Gwen took their seats. "Alright. We've got this terribly nasty virus from the twenty-ninth century--" Owen paused to write 'BAD VIRUS' on the whiteboard in scrawled block letters. "We don't have any bloody idea why it's here--"

"I bet it's the Rift," Ianto muttered.

"Didn't I say 'shut it'? ... We don't know why the demographics are backwards, we don't know how to treat it or prevent it, and we don't know why the Caduceus Virus Company has their name all over it. Actually, the only thing we really know is that it's _not_ African sleeping sickness." Owen drew a tiny blob in the corner of the board, roughly Africa-shaped, and crossed it out. "So. Why would a virus only affect the young?" Owen wrote 'YOUNG?' on the board.

"It's not," Jack observed. "The elderly die quickly when they contract it, from what I've read. The young are probably the only ones who can survive the virus long enough to be observed."

"Fine, so why would Caduceus invent a virus that kills old people and makes young people comatose?"

Jack shrugged. "I don't know," he admitted.

Toshiko frowned, deep in thought. "... You said viruses are designed for optimum efficiency, right?" she asked. Owen nodded; he clearly thought that was self-evident. "And we know that Caduceus makes anti-virals, but those are only effective if you live long enough to take them. But the encyclopaedia didn't say anything about inoculations, did it, Jack?"

"The encyclopaedia?" Jack repeated.

Toshiko nodded intently. "The Dalek encyclopaedia. The one from London. With the information about Caduceus?"

"... Right. No, it didn't say anything about prevention."

"So what if the virus was _supposed_ to cause comas on a massive scale?" Tosh finished, gesturing animatedly.

"Yeah. Viruses," Owen said, clearly unimpressed. "They do that."

Toshiko made a slightly frustrated noise. "No, I mean, we've been assuming that the virus causes comas just to mess with people, right? Because viruses 'do that'. But what if the virus was _designed_ to cause comas: why would someone find that valuable? Why would someone -- and I don't know if they're with Caduceus or not, I don't know that it matters -- go to the effort to design a virus that renders young people comatose? I can't believe they'd do it for kicks. They've got to be getting something out of it."

"When did the outbreak begin?" Gwen interjected.

"A week ago, give or take," Owen replied distractedly.

Gwen nodded. "The same time that Mary left. The Rift was opened a bit wide for her departure..."

"... Okay. So we've got young people in comas from the Caduceus Rift virus mess. What's the point?" Owen turned and scrawled 'W T F?' on the board.

"What good are comas?" Ianto asked.

"They're not," Owen replied with a small sigh. "It's just life support until the brain starts functioning again or rots to mush."

"So why would someone want a highly-contagious life-support virus?" said Ianto.

Jack's eyes lit up with a spark of inspiration, an avid interest seizing him. "Maybe because natural, biological life support is a more efficient and longer-lasting way to preserve organs for transplant?" The faces of his team all turned towards him suddenly.

"That's completely unethical...!" Gwen said, appalled.

"What would anyone do with a couple million bodies worth of organs?" Owen asked incredulously. "I mean, part of why the black market for them is good is because supply is low and demand is high. They're going to flood the market."

"Unless demand went way up, too," observed Ianto.

Jack stood up suddenly from the table, his chair clattering across the floor. An idea, a realization, _something_ was itching at the back of his head. He should remember...! He had to check -- he had to know. "I'll be right back. Carry on." Jack blew out of the room, heading straight for his office.

"... What was that about?" Gwen asked, slightly confused.

"Explosive diarrhea," Owen replied with a shrug.

Jack hunched over his laptop as it scanned the encyclopaedia in his wrist computer. Why the hell would anyone need millions of human organs? Transplants were only worthwhile if the originals were damaged, and Jack's brain had been electrified with his first thought: cyber-conversion. A large population coping with the aftermath of a failed Cyberman invasion would need transplants for the survivors. Lots of transplants. Millions of them. He had to know if there were ever, in the Caduceus corporation's time, attempts to 'upgrade' humans.

Jack's anticipation was high, but even so, he nearly fell off the edge of his chair when he found it. There: 2931, Earth, crowded by nearly twelve billion people. A billion converted and dead, another billion dead at the hands of the Cybermen. Hundreds of millions partially converted, missing eyes and arms and lungs and ears and all of them, _all_ of them screaming for help. A chill ran down his back.

A virus designed to collect and preserve healthy, young bodies would be precisely what they wanted.

... Were they coming to collect them? Were there more, traveling through the dark, through the Rift, coming to take the bodies they needed?


End file.
